Immigrants (and their descendants) from the western Pyrenees and Cantabrian seacoast region of southern France and northern Spain. Long regarded as the quintessential sheepherder of the American West, Basques entered the region as a part of the California gold rush. Many came from southern South America, where, by the early 1800s, Basques were heavily engaged in sheep husbandry on the pampas under frontier conditions. Thus, despite the common belief that Basques were transplanting a Pyrenean skill to the American West, the pattern of sheep transhumance that emerged throughout the region was based more upon a South American than a European model. By the 1850s, some Basques, disillusioned with mining, had turned to sheep husbandry in southern California, either leasing land from the dons or moving to the edges of European settlement. The typical pattern was for a sheepman to send back to Europe for a kinsman or fellow villager who would work for him for a few years. The herder would take his wages in ewes, running them alongside those of his employer. Once his own band was sufficiently large to be selfsupporting, he would head out in search of unoccupied range. By the turn of the century, Basques were present in the openrange districts of all thirteen Western states. In their guise as itinerant sheepmen (“tramps” to their detractors), Basques were vilified as usurpers. Moving ceaselessly about the public lands, and with no possessions other than a pack animal, gear, dogs, and a sheep band, the itiner ants, by their very existence, challenged the local arrangements of settled livestock ranchers (cattlemen and sheepmen alike). Technically, grazing was open to all on a first-come basis, though in reality the ranchers regarded the public lands adjacent to their holdings as their private domain. The tactics used to harass the itinerants varied from local legislation extending grazing rights one or two miles beyond private fence lines (subsequendy declared unconstitutional), to intimidation and outright violence such as the destruction of a sheep camp, the shooting of the sheep, or the roping and dragging of the herder himself. Such confrontations lent litigation to the courts and copy to the newspapers. Of greater significance was the itinerant sheepman’s role as a catalyst in the region’s land-use legislation. With creation of the national forests, newspaper headlines heralded “Sheepmen Get Basques Excluded.” In the first years after establishment of Yosemite National Park, it was necessary to use Army troops to patrol its precincts in order to keep itinerant Basque sheepmen off their traditional summer range. The desire to exclude the itinerants also informed legislation in the 1930s that ordered the remaining public lands into grazing districts, subsequendy under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Whether regarding access to summer range in the national forests or winter range controlled by the BLM, livestock allotments were henceforth to be awarded solely to U.S. citizens, with commensurate deeded land and in consultation with advisory boards consisting of local ranchers. Exclusion of the itinerants could not have been more complete. Thus, in a negative sense, Basques may be regarded as key architects of the land-use policies on the public domain of the American West.
Restrictive immigration policies enacted by the U.S. Congress in the 1920s limited Basque immigration. Based upon a national-origins quota, after 1924 only 131 Spaniards were to be admitted annually and most of Europe’s Basques resided in Spain. By World War II, most of the Basque herders had either died, retired, or returned to Europe. The manpower shortage of the war years exacerbated the labor crisis in the sheep industry. Consequently, a pattern emerged in which Basques contrived to reach an American port, jump ship, and make their way to a sheep ranch. The rancher then lobbied his congressman to introduce special legislation legalizing the herder’s status as an emergency measure. Through these socalled Sheepherder Laws, 383 Basques were accorded permanent residency. The practice was both cumbersome and inadequate. In 1950 Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada, an ex-sheepman, framed legislation to facilitate the recruitment and introduction of Basque sheepherders into the United States. The sheepmen formed the Western Range Association to facilitate the program. Between 1950 and the 1970s, several thousand Basques worked in the American West on three-year herding contracts (designed specifically to prevent them from qualifying for permanent residency, which would enable them to abandon herding). By the 1970s, sheep numbers on the open range were plummeting due to greater restrictions in response to budding environmentalism and trends in the world mar-ket for sheep products. At the same time as Europe’s postwar economy improved, Basques became unwilling to work for the relatively low sheepherder wages. The Western Range Association redirected its recruitment efforts toward Latin America. By the mid-1990s, there were only a few hundred sheepherders left in the American West, and they were much more likely to be Mexican, Peruvian, or Chilean than Basque. Throughout their nearly century and a half in the American West, the Basque immigrants were more sojourners than settlers. Few, if any, of the young men who left the Pyrenees came with the intention of remaining either in herding or in this country Rather, their idea was always to make a stake and return to Europe to retire a farm mortgage, purchase a property, or start a small business. However, in each cohort of immigrants a few changed their minds, buying or homesteading a ranch property or possibly establishing a small business in town. The demographic profile of Basque immigration (dominated by young, single males) and the seasonality of the labor demand within the sheep industry (roughly half of the herders were laid off after the lambs were shipped in the fall and two summer bands were combined into a single winter one) favored establishment of Basque boarding houses throughout the open-range districts of the American West. With the spread of the transcontinental railroad and its branches, the typical Basque “hotel” was situated close to the train station. Newly arrived immigrants, met at the dock in New York City by a representative of Valentin Aguirre’s Casa Vizcaína hotel and then sent westward with their destination pinned on their lapels, would descend wide-eyed from the train anxious to spot the promised ethnic haven. For the herder, the hotel was an address, a place to store his town clothes when out on the range, and his rifle, saddle, and gear when on a visit back to his homeland. Each hotel was a part of a wider intelligence network regarding job opportunities (usually, though not exclusively, in the sheep industry) and therefore served as an employment agency. The hotel was a base of operations for the vacationing herder out for a fling on the town. It was a convalescent home for an injured herder; a retirement home for the family-less one. The hotel keeper, usually an ex-herder himself, was translator, banker, confidant, and even father figure for his clients. Rather unwittingly, he also held the key to the formation of the Basque American community. He required kitchen and domestic help and activated his ties in the old country to bring over single women for service. In the singlemale atmosphere of the Basque hotel, few of the women remained unattached for long. Thus, each hotel provided a tiny, if steady, trickle of women who married men prepared to abandon herding (since the occupation was inimical to family formation) and settle down. Others sent back or went back to Europe for brides. In short, out of each cohort of the intending sojourners a few changed their minds and became permanent settlers in the American West. Over time, there came to be a few dozen or even hundred Basques in each of the regions open-range districts. For the Basque Americans, the hotels were the center of social life as well. It was there that they practiced their language, learned about the Basque country, and shared an occasional meal with the boarders, served family style at a common table. It was there that on weekends they joined the herders in dancing the jota to the strains of an accordion. It was there that more than one Basque American woman met her future spouse, thereby extending a pattern of endogamy into the second generation of the Basque American experience. In short, for Old World Basques and Basque Americans alike, the Basque hotel was the key ethnic institution, indeed practically the only one until the second half of the 20th century.
By the 1950s, there were the faint stirrings of Basque American ethnic pride. In 1949 Boise Basques formed a club, Euskaldunak, Inc. (Basques, Inc.), and in 1951 they built a clubhouse in the downtown area that functions to this day. In 1957 Robert Laxalt published his book Sweet Promised Land, the story of his father’s life as a sheepman in Nevada and California and his return visit to his natal village. The work was widely read and critically acclaimed, instantly providing the Basque Americans with their literary spokesman. In 1959 a Sparks, Nevada, casino operator, married to an Idaho Basque, decided to sponsor a national Basque festival. The venue proved fortuitous, since western Nevada was the one part of the American West where the largely Bizkaian population of eastern Oregon, southern Idaho, and northern Nevada overlapped with the mainly French and Navarrese Basque populations of California, eastern Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. The organizing committee embraced the spectrum of European Basque regional distinctions and bridged the Old World/New World-born generational gap as well. The hundreds of letters Laxalt had received from Basque Americans throughout the American West, thanking him for depicting their family’s saga by describing his own, served as the vital link for bringing together the heretofore isolated fragments of what ultimately became a Basque American community of regional scope. The first festival was an “invention” in the sense that its organizers combined certain Old World and New World ele-ments into a pastiche unlike anything previously celebrated on either side of the Atlantic. In the process, they established a model that continues to be emulated. In the aftermath of the first festival, Basque clubs proliferated in California, Nevada, and Idaho, most founded to sponsor a folk-dance group and to organize a local festival. Today there is a Basque festival cycle that is truly a movable feast, weekend-long celebrations that begin in late spring and shift venues throughout the region until late summer. Each festival likely entails a public dance, possibly a Basquelanguage mass, given by an ambulatory Basque chaplain, performances by the local club’s dance group in folk costume (and possibly one or more visiting ones as well), athletic contests (stone lifting, woodchopping, weight carrying and tug-ofwar), possibly sheep dog trials and a sheep-hooking contest, and a Western-style barbecue featuring lamb, “Basque beans,” sourdough bread, and copious amounts of red wine. Thus, like many other hyphenated Americans, by the 1960s and 1970s Basques were engaged in public display of their heritage. In this regard, they were a part of the broader “roots” phenomenon, though not to be confused with “ethnic revival,” since Basque Americans were developing unique forms of group expression rather than reviving previously forsaken ones. The wider public’s interest in the Basques was furthered by several factors. There was the aura surrounding them as Europe’s mystery people, a prehistoric group of undetermined origin speaking a language unrelated to any other human tongue. There was their sheepherding legacy with its appeal to a world grown weary with urban malaise and easily seduced by the imagery of the stoic figure leading a life of splendid isolation amidst the spectacular setting of Western deserts and mountains. Consequently, the Basque sheepherder and his colorful descendants of the rural West became the popular subjects of film documentaries, articles, and newspaper stones.